Noplace

The grime doctor shuffled down the corridor, his joints clicking and shuffling like reams of old paper. He wore shoes, or at least he thought he did, but sometimes he wasn’t sure what was artificially attached to him and what was actually a part of his body. But if he was wearing shoes, he was confident that they would be brown shoes. The grime doctor had always preferred brown to black, and anyway, if they were black they wouldn’t match his tan slacks, unless he wasn’t really wearing slacks and they were just a part of his body too. The grime doctor didn’t know, he didn’t care to make distinctions like that. Everything was just another something at the end of the day, and all somethings seemed-- to him at least-- to have more or less the same purpose as everything else.

“Hey man hey, what are you doing?” the grime doctor asked himself.

“Just a’shufflin’,” the grime doctor responded. “Just a’shufflin’ and a’shufflin’ to nowhere in particular.”

where to where to where to where to where to

The grime doctor was pretty confident that he’d been to a lot of places, but it was hard to think right now because there was so much anxiety bubbling just below his surfaces, and whenever he wanted to focus on something he had to fight against the urge to focus instead on all of the terrible things that were happening inside of him. He would start thinking about people, but then he’d get distracted by the way his foot felt in its maybe-shoe; he could feel a pebble or perhaps a grain of salt poking at his skin, and if there was a person in his head he would file them away for further examination-- that was if he could remember their name. Although, truth be told, it wasn’t the name that was the issue, it was the faces. Certain people’s faces he just couldn’t picture no matter how hard he tried. The grime doctor had once had a girlfriend years ago, whose face he was never able to picture, even when they’d been dating- even (if it could be believed) when she was right in front of him. But she’d broken up with him after a year or two, and now she was just a name whose face he couldn’t picture.

There was a window at the far end of the corridor, which the grime doctor now recognized as the basement of someone’s house. It was a narrow, wide window near the ceiling. It made the grime doctor feel like he was in a bunker below the earth. This effect was intensified by the pebbles that he could see lying outside the window, assembled in a pattern that was probably nothing but could be the answer the grime doctor was looking for. The grime doctor had been looking for answers for a long time, but he usually got distracted and ended up looking for a job or a love life instead. But right now he had the urge to find his way out of this mysterious bunker and go to those pebbles, kneel down, and if they weren’t his answer he would arrange them so that they were the answer. But would he need gloves to do so? Possibly. He’d have to make some last minute calls when he was on the scene. He could practically feel the bugs that lurked below those pebbles, he could feel them crawling on his hands (which he had to look at in order to confirm that they were still coming out of his sleeves).

“Hey, you know, life really is a lot of hard work,” someone told the grime doctor once.

Boy, did he know it. He was about to make his way out of here and really bust his hump working on those pebbles. He was going to work up a hell of a sweat out there.

“It’s not all fun and games,” the someone had also probably said. “And it ain’t fucking fair, doc, let me tell you. You gotta really work to be somebody in this place. Climb up the ladder, step on a few suckers along the way.”

If only there was a ladder out of the bunker. If there was a way out, the grime doctor couldn’t find it. There were couches in the way, and the sprawling bodies of people whose names eluded him. One of the bodies looked up and spoke at him-- loudly-- but it was too much effort for the doctor to silence his inner voices long enough to process the body’s words.

The grime doctor had almost forgotten why he was making such a fuss to get outside in the first place when he remembered the pebbles, but the pebbles didn’t seem significant to him now, they just seemed like an excuse to escape the drab scenery which he could no longer abide. He really needed to go somewhere, because he was sure there was some place that would be giving off just the right vibes, a place where he could kick back and-- and-- and watch television or read a book-- do something comfortable. Anything other than eat. The thought of putting things inside of himself, of crushing them up and having them slide down his throat, was repulsive. The grime doctor had an image in his head of a video he’d watched in school of some kind of bacteria swallowing up a smaller bacteria inside of itself. They had merged, horribly-- intolerably.

His fingers were twitching with the desire to be nice and comfortable somewhere. This bunker just wasn’t the place. There weren’t any lights on, and at midday with those half windows everywhere everything looked sort of blue, and the other bodies were far too judgmental, he could practically feel them constructing their theories of him only a few feet away.

The grime doctor knew this wasn’t the place.